The Cost of Insurance Website Traffic

Online traffic won't freely find its way to your insurance agency's website. So how can you generate it? ITC President Laird Rixford discusses the two ways you can drive traffic to your insurance website.

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Video Transcript

It’s the most common complaint I hear from agents about their websites: “I’m not getting enough traffic.”

My first response is “What are you doing to generate traffic?” Many agents aren’t doing anything or aren’t entirely sure what they’re doing to get traffic.

How to generate website traffic can be a mystery. But if you understand traffic and its cost, you’re going to be more likely to get more of it.

So I’m going to tell you the truth about website traffic.

You have a lot of competition for consumers’ attention online. I’m not just talking about the big insurance advertisers. I also mean the social networks, the news websites, the shopping websites.

We have almost unlimited ways to spend our time online. Convincing people to spend some of that time on your website is no easy task.

Traffic does not magically find its way to your insurance agency website. And traffic does not come free to the agency with the best looking website.

Here’s the truth. There are two ways you get traffic to your insurance agency website. You either pay for it. Or, you earn it.

If you don’t have a lot of time, but you have the budget, you can pay for traffic. There’s pay-per-click advertising on the search engines and content networks. There’s also advertising on social media networks.

Here’s the key to paid traffic. You need to make sure your paid traffic converts at a high level that works for your agency.

Identify what your cost per lead acquisition is. Then, determine your close ratio and identify how much you spend on each sale. Also, look at your return on investment. Are you taking a loss, breaking even or profiting from your paid traffic investment?

One thing I want you to remember about paid traffic. You need to be detail oriented and disciplined. It is easy to lose money fast with paid traffic. Especially if you’re not paying attention to your costs, conversion rate and close ratios.

The downside of paying for traffic is if you stop paying, you stop getting traffic.

If you decide to turn off your advertising to save money, then your traffic will drop. That is unless you have worked to earn traffic at the same time.

The other traffic option if you have some time and not much marketing budget is you can do the work to earn traffic.

Get to the office early, and write original content for your blog. Find people to follow on social media and engage with them directly. Optimize your website for the search engines. Work on getting online reviews.

Do all this every single day.

Yes, it is a lot. Yes, it can be difficult and tiring. But if you want online marketing success and don’t have much of a budget, you need to invest your time. And you really need to commit to it.

It takes time to build an online reputation. It takes time to establish yourself as an expert. You cannot do this overnight. But when you commit to it. When you focus on earning traffic, you will begin to see it increase.

The problem with earned traffic is that it is easy to forget its cost because we pay it in the past.

We often don’t realize the true value of earned traffic.

But earned traffic, like paid, has a real cost. Don’t allow yourself to diminish the value of earned traffic. It can lead to forgetting about the most important step of any traffic: Conversion.

Earned traffic keeps coming in even if you stop advertising. To sustain earned traffic, you will need to continue your content and optimization efforts over time. That is part of the cost.

Doing both paid and earned traffic well is the holy grail of digital marketing.

Building earned traffic comes from building a trust with your audience. You can also do this by ranking well in search engine results. By engaging on social media and building a good email list. You get these from creating and sharing good, valuable content.

Paid traffic that converts well and at a profit is a helpful strategy. It can help you support your earned traffic as you get a little more reach.

If there is only one thing you take away from this video, it should be this… Traffic is not free. You either have to pay for it or you earn it.

To build consistent traffic and have digital marketing success, it takes money or effort. Sometimes, it might even take both.

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